One rainy evening in early January, I found myself in the pub with Alex, a good friend who had an idea. He was planning a summer cycling bikepacking trip to watch the Tour de France on the Alpe d’Huez. Given January’s frigid temperatures and endless rain, I was looking for a bit of escapism, so naturally, I said I’d join him.
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Fast forward six months and the trip had morphed a little away from a bikepacking adventure into more of a simple cycling holiday, tracing a few of the Tour de France stages. But the goal was the same – watch the Tour de France peloton race up the legendary Alpe d’Huez.
A bike setup with a twist
Having recently sold my Specialized Aethos (project bike incoming), I turned to my very similar Specialized Crux Pro for road duties. While it isn’t perfectly suited to road riding, I convinced myself that the slightly more relaxed geometry would be nice for back to back days on the bike.
But to make it better for road riding I changed a few things. Firstly, I swapped my 46 tooth gravel outer chainring for a 50 tooth, borrowed from a Shimano 105 chainset. At the same time I swapped the 36T inner for a 34T, just to give me an easier time on long climbs.
I combined this with my usual 11-36T cassette from my gravel setup. Using this with the long cage on the GRX Di2 rear derailleur certainly gave me some chain length issues, but everything worked well enough.
Wheels came in the form of Yoeleo’s QianKun CS50. Their carbon spokes keep weight down to a claimed 1,185g, and with the excellent stiffness, I was hoping for a slightly easier time on the climbs.
Onto these I fitted a set of 30mm Vittoria Corsa Pro tyres, though with the Yoeleo’s 23mm internal rim width, these sat out at 32mm. This, for me, provided the ideal combination of speed, comfort and cornering confidence.
The twist comes at the front end where, instead of my usual cycling computer, I had my phone mounted. Cadence, a bike computer app for Apple and Android phones, had challenged me to use their app for all of my data recording, mapping and analysis needs.
Having used a cycling computer on my bikes since I was about 14 years old, my attachment to these little devices is strong. But I resisted the urge to bring one, downloaded Cadence and got their Elite subscription to unlock turn directions amongst a host of other features.
The setup was simple, and while I prefer to keep my main screen simple with just essential information such as power, speed, heart rate, distance and ride time, there are approximately one million billion data points and graphs to choose from.
There is, however, plenty more to this app, as the next few days of adventures were about to show…
Day 1: A tale of uncategorised climbs
Our first day of cycling was set to follow the route of stage 15, a 180-something kilometre day peppered with cat 3 climbs and finishing with a cat 1 and HC double punch.
Looking at the route over a disappointing breakfast, we realised that the opening cat 3 climb was a very busy and generally dull arterial road, so we skipped it, starting instead, where the heavy traffic left the route.
This turned into a great decision as the opening 40km of our trip had us sailing mostly downhill through charming French mountain villages, still decorated in the celebrations of the Tour’s passing.
But once the descending was done, there was a lesson to be learned, hidden in plain sight via the day’s stage profile.
Watch the Tour de France and occasionally the commentators will mention something about the riders tackling an uncategorised climb. When riding in the Alps, these rises that don’t merit recognition from the route organisers are often very decent climbs.
Pick them up and plonk them down in the UK and you’d hail them as a nice challenge, but mix them in with the massive cols we’d find later in the day and they are insignificant.
As the tough terrain drained our legs, our minds turned towards lunch. Arriving into a town after 2pm, however, resulted in a very small selection of restaurant options. Thankfully, Cadence uses Apple, Google and MapBox for navigation, so it was rather easy to find the local McDonalds and route ourselves towards a Big Mac.
On post-lunch legs we began the first of two major climbs, the Col de la Croisette is devilishly steep, averaging over 10% for several of its twisting kilometres. That said, a freshly laid road surface and my small gears helped to make the climb more than bearable.
Cresting the summit offers you some truly wonderful views, but it was the descent off the other side that I fell in love with. Mildly technical, but with good sight lines and plenty of soft meadow should you get it wrong, I was happy to lean the bike over to the wrong side of the road.
La Roche-sur-Foron was the next destination and we passed through the roundabout which had ended Vingegaard’s Tour de France just a day earlier.
As we rode on, the lights started to go out, not only in my legs, but in the sky too. With 6 hours ridden, yet an elapsed time of 10 hours, I decided to end my ride at the base of the final climb, which would have taken an hour. Too much filming and faffing put paid to any hopes of reaching the top before dark.
Day 2: Don’t get lost!
After a very long day, and with plenty of filming to do, I was after a much shorter ride. So while the Tour route meandered its way between Chambery and Voiron, I chose a more direct route.
To do so, I created a route and loaded it into the Cadence app. It helpfully opted to take me on a number of cycle paths as I got through the city and I was soon following the middle section of stage 17.
After riding up an unchallenging and uncategorised climb, I became a bit bored with the Tour route and opted to sneak off, choosing a much prettier road into town for the sprint finish.
Now off the main road, I also popped my AirPods in (to listen to the road.cc podcast, obviously) for some entertainment. Approaching a roundabout, I got to hear Cadence’s turn directions in my ears.
For navigating unfamiliar towns, this was excellent as I could keep my eyes fully on the road, while the directions came through in perfect clarity. It was like having Apple Maps going in the car and I can see this being a feature I use a lot in the future.
With such good directions, I arrived into Voiron and followed the stage signs to the finish, which hadn’t been built yet. I grabbed a beer and watched the end of the time trial while waiting for the others. Over more beers and a pizza later that evening, we made possibly the best decision yet.
Day 3: Wild, mild camping
The fans that camp on the side of a road to catch a glimpse of the race are, in my opinion, one of the best things about cycling. There are few sports where this is possible and we thought we’d do a bit of wild camping.
So after a simple day of riding more largely dull truckers roads toward the final climb (Tour de France routes really aren’t the best for casual cycling), we started climbing towards the ski town.
On the way up, I decided to give Cadence’s workout feature a go. There are a bunch to choose from and I settled on a little threshold session as I figured I’d be roughly in that zone anyway.
When a workout is selected, a dedicated screen pops up with the info you’re likely to need, but I particularly liked the gauge for my power. When deep in an effort, I don’t really care about (nor am I able) sticking to an exact power figure. Instead it’s good enough to be ballpark. A quick glance to see if I’m a bit low, or if I need to ease off a little, is a nicer way to train in my opinion.
With the climb done, we found a flat enough patch of ground at around 1km to go and got busy pitching the tents.
I’ll call this mild camping for the simple fact that it was ridiculously easy. Our two-man tents from Decathlon went up with a simple pull of a cord and we ate a simple pasta dinner, cooked on our new camp stove, while watching the Tour organisation set up all of the barriers.
It would have been a very comfortable nights sleep, apart from the intermittent boy racers that seemed keen to drift around every corner. But I woke up somewhat refreshed and spent the day soaking the whole Tour de France experience in.
The publicity caravan rolled through, I got an excellent bucket hat from EF Education and watched Richard Carapaz win the stage. From the roof of a van we sang Fred Wright a song (I think he liked it) and then it was time to wait in an endless queue to get off the mountain.
Lockdown on L’Alpe
Our final day was simple. Ride in to Bourg d’Oiasans, spin up the Alpe, and then watch the race wherever we could find a spot.
There was just one issue. A flat Di2 battery meant we had to visit Cycles et Sports (an excellent bike shop) to borrow a charger and while we sat sipping a coffee, the French police closed the road to everyone, even cyclists.
Now, I understand closing the road to cars, which would have struggled to find parking. I would also understand closing the road an hour or two before the race arrived. But to close the road five hours ahead of time and before the stage had even started seemed a bit excessive!
Having been to watch the Tour on Alpe d’Huez twice previously, I’ve always been careful to get up the climb in plenty of time. This year felt excessive.
Knowing a small connecting road, we tried to find a way through, but were again turned away. But where there is a goat track, there is a way, and we hiked the bikes rather precariously up to the road above.
Once on the climb we had great fun riding up through the crowds, which were in great voice already and more than willing to make a tunnel for us to ride through. This eclipsed the frustration of being turned away at the base and as we rode through the loudest crowds on Norwegian corner, we knew we’d found our spot for the day.
Bike rides don’t have to be far or fast to be excellent. They don’t even have to take in the most scenic roads. Sometimes all you need is about half a million mostly drunk cycling fans, and a can-do attitude.
Thank you to Cadence for setting me an excellent challenge. If you want to try the app, road.cc readers can get a one month free trial of the Elite tier. Head to getcadence.app/roadcctdf
